I shake my head, so choked up I can barely speak. “And it’s especially not good for the state of our marriage. Things were finally feeling really solid. He…said he loved me.”
Her head whips toward me, a grin splitting her face. “He said that? He said the words?”
“Yeah.” I can’t help smiling back.
“What a marshmallow!” she squeals gleefully, throwing her arms around me. “This is amazing. You’ve turned my big bad brother into a teddy bear. I love it.”
“Yeah, but…when he finds out about this, he’s going to hate me. What if this messes up everything?” Panic sets in, and I pull back. “After all our hard work to build DRM’s reputation back up, Monica had to go and tear it back down. Luka’s never going to forgive me. I mean, the whole point of this marriage was to improve the company’s image. Not destroy it.”
“This doesn’t destroy anything,” Emzee insists. “I guess you might look like a gold digger, and maybe Luka looks like he got tricked, but in the end people will see that your relationship is really real and that Elite doesn’t actually even have anything on our company.”
“I’m not sure Luka will see it that way,” I say with a sigh.
“Girl, please,” Emzee says. “He loves you, and he’ll understand you had nothing to do with this.”
“But I did! My original plan was to go through with it. I can’t change that. And now the whole world will be talking about it, and about us. And not in a good way.”
“Who cares? The important thing is that you didn’t go through with it—that’s what matters. And Danica Rose is going to be fine. Listen, let’s divide and conquer. I’ll call Stefan now while you go see Luka at work and talk it out. I promise everything’s gonna be okay.”
She squeezes my hand, and I squeeze back. “Okay.”
I wish I could believe her.
Brooklyn
Chapter 23
I just hit a car.
Heart pounding, I grip the steering wheel of my SUV and stare blankly at the light blue Prius next to me. I tried to pull into the parking space so fast, I didn’t turn enough and clipped the back end of the other car. Their taillight is smashed, the trunk slightly dented.
Jesus H. Christ. I have to calm down. My adrenaline is pumping and I can’t get my breathing under control. I haven’t checked my phone since I left the deli. Emzee kept telling me it was going to be okay, to just talk to Luka and we’d work it out. I hope she’s right.
I want the exposé fiasco to just go away. But rationally, I know it won’t happen—so we need to figure out how to do damage control. Together. That’s what we should be focusing on right now, and instead I go and hit a damn car.
My hands shake as I throw the SUV in reverse and carefully park. Then I slip out and scribble an apology, my contact info, and the number of my insurance company on the back of a receipt and tuck it under the windshield wiper. I don’t know if I should call the police to report myself, but right now this is the last thing I have the energy to deal with.
My marriage is on the line. Again. My career is on the line. Again. The Zoric family business could very well face another fallout, but this time, it’ll be because of me. I’m sure by the end of the day, it will be all over social media that I ran into someone’s car and fled the scene, too. The dirt will just keep piling up and up and up against me. By morning, I’ll be part of cancel culture. My Insta followers will abandon me, my social media standing will dry up, and I’ll never be offered another contract again.
A desperate laugh bursts out of me, but it does little to fend off the wave of panic.
The truth is, I can imagine overcoming all of these things, starting over again even if it all blows up in my face…but what I can’t imagine is recovering from the ruin of my marriage. Luka finally told me he loves me, and in a blink, it could all be gone. I keep my sunglasses on and my head down as I hurry through the parking garage and toward the elevator that will take me up to the Danica Rose offices. My skin prickles as I anticipate paparazzi jumping out from behind parked cars, snapping their